Qurat-ul-ain Shaheen

Qurat-ul-ain Shaheen

About

Hi! My name is Qurat-ul-ain. I just submitted my doctoral (PhD) thesis at the School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews. I am now excited about the transition to the next role.

I am a computer science researcher interested in how machine learning systems can reason about their own ignorance. My PhD introduced the Knowledge and Error Profile (KEP), a framework that treats classification error not as a single number but as three distinct semantic types: uncertainty, distortion, and absence; grounded in cognitive theories of human error. I showed that actively selecting training instances based on these error synergies outperforms conventional methods like query-by-bagging, and that the optimal error synergy depends on the dataset. KEP can be used as an interpretability framework to meta-analyse the model’s learning in terms it its errors.

Before my PhD, I spent 6+ years as a software engineer in industry developing CAD/CAE software (Bentley systems, Pakistan) and UI development (SCCH, Austria); and as a researcher at IIIA-CSIC (Barcelona) and Warsaw University of Technology. I build experimental pipelines in R, Python/scikit-learn and production systems in C++/C#.

My research interests are multi-disciplinary: I am interested in investigating the role of error semantics in expert judgement aggregation as well as in active learning for ensembles. Another area of interest is the transparency and trustworthiness of socio-techinical systems utlising intelligent agents.

Reasearch Topics

  • Active machine learning for single and ensemble algorithms.
  • Error-aware machine learning
  • Error analysis for data quality issues.
  • Error analysis and aggregation in expert judgments.
  • Error aware automated reasoning.
  • Explainable socio-technical systems.

Grants and Fellowships

  • University of St Andrews School of Computer Science PhD Scholarhsip: 08/2022 - 01/2026.
  • Marie Skłodowska-Curie ITN-ETN Early Stage Researcher Grant: 09/2020 - 08/2022.
  • Erasmus Mundus MSc. Scholarship Award: 09/2016 - 08/2018.

Academic Distinctions

  • University of St Andrews’s Best Dependable Software Systems Project Award: 07/2018, DESEM Summer School, Ireland.
  • First class honors in MSc.
  • 6th position in a class of 44 in bachelor’s degree.